Spitzer, M

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© Applied Semiotics/Sémiotique appliquée 2:4 (1997), 41-48Meditations on Meyer’s Hobby Horses:Levels of Motivation in Musical SignsMichael SpitzerUniversity of DurhamOne of the quirks of the history of music theory is that developmentsin our understanding of sound perception frequently ride on the back ofprior discoveries in the realm of vision. The ear borrows from the eye. Ahistorical sketch, working backwards, would begin with the influence ofDavid Marr’s work on connectionist models of visual perception uponmusic theorists such as Jamshed Bharucha and Robert O. Gjerdingen.Moving to the mid-century, the impact of Gestalt psychology can betraced not only to the theories of Leonard Meyer, but also to Lehrdal andJackendoff’s generative model of tonal structure. Earlier still, it is a factthat Helmholtz’s epoch-making On the Sensations of Tone was conse-quent upon his research on the physiology of the eye. The priority of vi-sion over sight is even evident at the dawn of music psychology, in thepedagogical theories of A.B. Marx. Marx’s compositional treatise, DieLehre von der Musikalische Komposition (1837) applies lessons learnt from anearlier tradition of drawing manuals. The Swiss pedagogue JohannPestalozzi’s A B C der Anschauung (1803) instructed children in how to seemore clearly by teaching them to draw prime geometric forms, such assquares, lines and arcs. By internalizing visual schemata, children learnt toperceive an order in the world. A student in Marx’s school would inter-nalise analogous musical schemata, namely the Satz, Gang, and Periode.With Pestalozzi and Marx’s theories of perceptual schemata, the circleof influence takes us back to the twentieth century, and two seminalbooks from the 1950's. Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion of 1959 revolu-Michael SPITZER42 AS / SAtionized studies in the history of art by demonstrating that pictorial repre-sentation relied as much on manipulation of stereotypical patterns andframeworks as on a supposedly “veridical” mimesis of reality. Leonard B.Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956) cast an exactly parallel influ-ence on the analysis of musical style. Meyer argued that musical meaningis emergent from the arousal, inhibition and confirmation of expectationscreated by stylistic patterns. Just as Gombrich’s study marked the firstmainstream assimilation of the psychology of visual perception into ico-nography (Gombrich cites scientists such as J.J. Gibson), Meyer’s workformed the first comprehensive engagement between music analysis andthe perceptual principles of the Gestalt school. Emotion and Meaning inMusic signalled the start of a long and illustrious project, of which the rig-orous Explaining Music (1973) and the monumental Style and Music (1989)have so far proved to be the pinnacles. Despite their shared concerns, theanalogy between Gombrich and Meyer is not synchronous. Art and Illu-sion turned out to be Gombrich’s magnum opus, and the critic has failedto build a serious theoretical method upon the work’s many apercus. Bycontrast, Meyer’s best work lay in the future. Explaining Music, togetherwith a handful of major articles such as “Grammatical Simplicity and Re-lational Richness” (1975), and “Exploiting Limits” (1980), revealed amuch greater gift for systematic theorising. It is my contention, however,that the affinity between the two thinkers has become closer over theyears; that Meyer’s theory, which originally focused on issues of meaning,has now turned its spotlight onto issues of representation.    Meyer’s recent work has dwelt on distinctions between “natural”and “conventional” signs. In semiotic terms, his writings engage with thedegree to which stylistic tokens can be said to be “motivated’, or even“iconic” (as opposed, in the Peircian sense, to “symbolic”). In this re-spect, music analysis has only just caught up, at a distance of a quarter ofa century, with art criticism. This time-lapse conforms to the historicalpattern I sketched at the start of this essay. I will argue, moreover, that ifwe view Meyer’s mature theory as a delayed convergence with the prob-lematic of pictorial representation, than we will gain fresh insights intosemiotic, even mimetic, dimensions of musical processes. Starting with abrief review of Gombrich’s celebrated article, “Meditations on a HobbyHorse,” I will track the evolution of Meyer’s ideas as they ride, as it were,on the horse’s back.    The subject of Gombrich’s article is a very ordinary hobby horse. “It issatisfied with its broomstick body and its crudely carved head” (p.1).Gombrich wonders how we should address it. “Should we describe it asMeditations on Meyer’s Hobby HorsesVol. 2 (N  4)          4  3 oan ‘image of a horse?’” Is it rather “a portrayal of a horse,” or even “asubstitute for a horse”? Gombrich opts for the latter. The stick is neithera sign signifying the concept “horse,” nor does it represent or refer to anyaspects of real horses. It is “horselike” only because it can be ridden by achild. The implications for art criticism and semiotics are profound: thetertium comparationis of a symbol and its object is not external form butfunction. “We may sum up the moral of this “Just So Story” by sayingthat substitution may precede portrayal and creation communication” (5).Objects with functional utility or biological relevance become investedwith significative value. “The greater the biological relevance an objecthas for us the more will we be attuned to its recognition – and the moretolerant will therefore be our standards of formal correspondence” (6-7).Objects rooted in deep-seated biological or psychological principles thusbehave like “attractors” to processes of signification. The upshot ofGombrich’s argument is that the distinction between nature and conven-tion is simply a matter of degree, not kind. In the words of W.J.T. Mitch-ell, it is “the difference between conventions that are abiding, deep, andwidespread, and conventions that are relatively arbitrary, changeable, andsuperficial” (1986: 76). In semiotic terms, Gombrich’s essay suggests thatthe Peircian “icon”/”symbol” distinction can be replaced with a gradientof iconicity; an ascending scale of motivation. On one level, of course,Gombrich’s ideas are not especially new. The processes of “stylisation”and “ritualization” are staples of anthropology, and have become centralto the emerging field of bio-semiotics. According to Irenäus Eibl-Eibsefeldt:        During the process of stylisation, schematization takes place: Certain fea-tures ofthe objects become emphasised, and less important characteristics areleft out. Thus, by gradual abstraction, an object may even change into a sign.The process in many ways resembles the ritualization of behaviour, by whichanimal and human behaviour patterns change into signals through phylogeneticand cultural evolution (Rentschler, 1992).    On a different level, however, Gombrich’s persuasive application ofphylogenetic principles to the realm of high art marks a unique achieve-ment. It can only be regarded as the model for the “bio-semiotic” tinta ofMeyer’s Style and Music:       Other things being equal, innovations that are consonant with human per-ceptual and cognitive capacities – the constraints of the central nervous systemMichael SPITZER44 AS / SA– are more likely to be used and replicated than innovations that are not so. Forinstance, novelties are more likely to be selected and replicated if they do notinvolve stimuli so extreme... that perception is painful or patterning problem-atic. Equally important, selection and replication are more likely if innovationsconform to the Gestalt principles of pattern comprehension... ln short, innova-tions that are compatible with the constraints and proclivities of human per-ceptual and cognitive processes will tend to be comprehended as coherent, sta-ble, and memorable relationships. As such, they have a reasonable chance ofbeing replicated as aspects of the idiom of a composer or as part of the dialectof the compositional community (140).    Right from the start, Meyer’s writings sought to ground style analysis in“the nature of human mental processes” as well as “expectations that arebased upon learning” (1956: 43). Nevertheless, while Emotion and Meaningin Music always avowed the mutual efficacy of innate and learnt perceptualprinciples, little attempt was made to discriminate or grade them. Further-more, the differential weighting of Gestalt and cultural factors played nopart in the analysis of pieces or the classification of musical materials.Differential weighting and classification constituted the most vital contri-bution of Explaining Music. The heart of the book (chapter 7, 131-241) is acatalogue of six diverse “melodic structures,” each of which interminglednatural and learned principles in a different way. Underlying Meyer’s sur-vey is a broad dichotomy between “gap-fill” melodies and “archetypalschemata.” “Gap-fill melodies consist of two elements: a disjunct interval– the gap – and conjunct intervals which fill the gap” (145). The implic-ative properties of gaps are innate, universal, and stable through time:they are “natural.” By contrast, archetypal schemata, even though theyarise out of and enshrine psychological constants, result through learningand require knowledge in order to be understood. One of the most com-mon of Meyer’s schemata is the “changing-note” pattern. These circle asingle note, and “involve motion away from and back to stability” (191).The largest study of the changing-note schema was completed by a disci-ple of Meyer, the theorist Robert O. Gjerdingen, in his book A ClassicTurn of Phrase (1988). While gap-fill melodies are prevalent across the en-tire world and in every historical period, Gjerdingen’s “1-7 4-3" schemawas prototypical of a localised musical repertory (the European galant)and a narrow historical time-band (circa 1770).That gap-fill melodies and changing-note schemata are perceived dif-ferently was confirmed by an experimental study Meyer undertook to-gether with Burton S. Rosner (1986). More ambitiously, Meyer’s latestbook, Style and Music (1989) projected the gap-fill schema distinction ontoan historical narrative. In brief, Meyer conceives of music history, theMeditations on Meyer’s Hobby HorsesVol. 2 (N  4)          4  5 oshift from the Classical style to Romanticism and then to the modern age,as a retreat from Culture towards Nature. If the changing-note schemaepitomised the rule-governed, learned and conventional aspects of classi-cism, then the Romantics’ “repudiation of convention” (164) was rejectedin the increased importance “of secondary parameters in shaping musicalprocess and structure” (208). Secondary, statistical parameters, such astexture, density, dynamics and timbre, “seem able to shape experiencewith minimal dependence on learned rules and conventions” (218). “Formany listeners, the power of sheer sound – as music slowly swelled inwaves of sonic intensity, culminating in a statistical climax or a plateau ofapotheosis – in a very real sense shaped experience ‘naturally’” (218). Ifchanging-note melodies are characteristic of eighteenth- century music,than the values of 19th-century music were typified by “axial” schemata.Axial patterns are subject to the natural psychological satisfaction of re-turn. They are, furthermore, “consonant with values of Romanticismsuch as openness, reliance on natural rather than learned means, and ap-peal to less sophisticated members of the elite egalitarian audience” (242).Perhaps the most suggestive element of Meyer’s late theory is thefashioning of a nature/convention continuum in terms of music theory.As we have seen, the appraisal of signs according to their level of utilitar-ian or biological motivation is a practice associated with the visual arts.The originality of Gombrich’s version of mimesis is that it concerns notthe relation of the sign to its referent, but rather, at a much higher level,the relation between the signification process and the invariant principlesof perception and of learning. Meyer’s theory would therefore seem topoint to the possibility of a “painterly” music theory, an analytical dis-course finally able to represent musical structure in relation to the world.Nevertheless, even by the standards of his most rigorous work, the earlierExplaining Music, Meyer’s Style and Music is methodologically incomplete.For example, the “convention” side of his nature/convention dichotomyis analytically extremely limited. On the natural side, Meyer has had notrouble in graphing entire movements in terms of gap-fill (Gestalt) princi-ples. By contrast, Meyer’s classification of melodic schemata has onlybeen applied to short phrases, and we still await our first move-ment-length schematic analysis. What might a “musical iconography” ofnineteenth-century music look like? I will close with some suggestions.A favourite trope of the Romantic composer is the “journey intoNature.” Wagner’s Siegfried affords perhaps the prototypical example.Act I is dominated by schematic song-forms. These will be broken andmelted down, like the very fragments of the hero’s sword, in the opera’sMichael SPITZER46 AS / SAfamous Forest Murmurs. Dahlhaus terms such statistical sound-effects“Klangflache,” “outwardly static, but inwardly in constant motion” (1989:307). The Klangflache “conveys a landscape because it is exempted fromthe principles of teleological progression’; i.e., it provides release from thesyntactic “scripts” of rule-governed composition. The listener’s fancyroams free, subject only to the default principles of Gestalt patterns. Overthe course of the first two acts, the musical materials have drifted fromthe schematic end of the spectrum to the natural. Crucially, Wagner has“thematised” this drift in the very fabric of his drama. Not wishing toclaim priority for either side of Wagner’s music/drama dialectic, it is per-haps best to point simply to the perfect “fit” between the Idee and the ma-terial. Of course, the intermingling of “learned” and “natural” principlesis infinitely rich and multi-levelled in Wagner’s score. Meyer’s tools, how-ever, have the potential for tracking the landscape painting with a newtype of musical iconography.    In conclusion, it is worth pointing out that Meyer’s schema/Gestaltdichotomy follows in the wake of many other oppositions in cognitivescience and semiotics. Meyer has himself compared it (after Gjerdingen)to Schank and Abelson’s distinction between “scripts” and “plans” (1989:245). Syntactic relationships and the schemata associated with them arescript-like (“A script is a structure... made up of slots and requirementsabout what can fill those slots”). Plans are repositories “for general infor-mation that will connect events that cannot be connected by use of anavailable script or by a standard causal chain expansion” (245); gap-filland axial melodies are plan-like patterns “that provide for general kindsof relationships, such as ‘move around (above and below) some centraltone, and then return to it’.” Meyer might also have referred to NelsonGoodman’s (1976) nominalist classification of sign-types. For Goodman,generic differences between signs pertain not to levels of resemblance butrather to their internal structure. Schemata would correspond to Good-man’s digital signs, being differentiated and articulated. Gap-fills accordwith analogue signs, which are non-articulated and dense.But Meyer’s semiotics remains profoundly anti-nominalist on accountof the synergy between the dynamics of the referent, music as soundingmotion, and the dynamics of perception. In the final analysis, what linksmusic to the world is the pervasiveness of biological and psychologicalprinciples. This “realist” aspect of Meyer’s thinking has remained con-stant over the years. If anything, it has got stronger. It would not be toofanciful to interpret this late realist turn as a rapprochement with thesame Gibsonian ecological approach to perception that had inspiredMeditations on Meyer’s Hobby HorsesVol. 2 (N  4)          4  7 oGombrich nearly forty years previously. The musical landscape affordsparticular materials which shape themselves around its contours, just asthe child presses his body against the wooden stick which is his hobbyhorse. The affordance of a surface or object in the environment is what itoffers the animal; whether it can be grasped or eaten, trodden or satupon; whether it has been designed around our perceptual mechanisms,or if it rubs against our grain. More radically, Meyer may be said to haverediscovered the realism implicit in the Gestalt school’s original theories,in particular Koffka’s idea of the “demand character” of an object: “Toprimitive man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it...a fruit says ‘Eat me;’ water says ‘Drink me;’ thunder says ‘Fear me’”(1935: 7).    The approach of distant thunder had always been Meyer’s prototypicalexample of tension leading to release:        The low, foreboding rumble of distant thunder on an oppressive summerafternoon, its growing intensity as it approaches, the crescendo of the graduallyrising wind, the ominous darkening of the sky, all give rise to an emotional ex-perience in which expectation is fraught with powerful uncertainty (1956: 28).    In Meyer’s original theory, the approaching storm only signified on aformal level, as a confirmation of a syntactic implication. The “demandcharacter” of the thunder, its affording of value, was an element of whichearly Meyer was hardly cognisant. Nevertheless, with every passing year,the “demand character” of the musical material has lowered ever moreportentously in Meyer’s skies. And now, as we await fulfilment of the the-ory, whether it fall to Meyer or to one of his disciples, we can assert witha growing sense of expectancy that the ear is on the verge of seeing.48 AS / SABibliographyDAHLHAUS, Carl. Nineteenth-Century Music, Trans. J. Bradford Robinson. California:1989.GJERDINGEN, Robert O. A Classic Turn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology of Convention.Philadelphia: 1988.GOMBRICH, Ernst H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.Oxford: 1959.GOMBRICH, Ernst H. “Meditations on a Hobby Horse,” in Meditations on a Hobby Horseand Other Essays On the Theory of Art. London: 1963 (originally published in Aspectsof Form, ed. L.L. Whyte, London, 1951).GOODMAN, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis:1976.KOFFKA, K. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: 1935.MARX, Adolph B. Die Lehre von der Musikalische Komposition. Leipzig: 1837-63.MEYER, Leonard B. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: 1956.— . Explaining Music. Chicago: 1973.— . “Grammatical Simplicity and Relational Richness: The Trio of Mozart’s G minorSymphony.” Critical Inquiry 2: 4 (1975), 693-761.— . “Exploiting Limits: Creation, Archetypes and Style Change.” Daedalus 109: 2 (1980),177-205.— . Style and Music. Philadelphia: 1989.MEYER, Leonard B. and Burton S. ROSNER. “The perceptual roles of melodic pro-cess, contour and form,” Music Perception 4 (1986), 1-39.MITCHELL, W.J.T. Iconology. London: 1986.PESTALOZZI, J. A B C der Anschauung. Zurich: 1803.RENTSCHLER, Ingo, B. HERZBERGER and D. EPSTEIN. Beauty and the Brain: Bio-logical Aspects of Aesthetics. London: 1992.

'Meditations on Meyer's Hobby Horses: Levels of Motivation in Musical Signs'

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